Musical accompaniment: A Picture of Her Face by the great ragtime player Scott Joplin

This 1893 photograph by Alfred Stieglitz is called The Terminal.

Based on the horse-drawn bus headed to Harlem and all of the snow and steam, we can assume this is New York City in the winter.

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It’s hard to believe that until about 125 years ago, this scene would be something any city dweller would know well. The sight of it would conjure up sensations and scents and many memories.

Imagine how different life would be if we still relied on horses for transportation. The advent of automobiles made a profound difference in the lives of humanity.  We move today with what would seem to the people in this picture to be unimaginable speed. I imagine those busses weren’t heated either!

There are tradeoffs. The presence of animals probably made people more gentle and patient. The picture conveys the chaos so it probably was noisy but not in the same way we think of noise in environments like that today. I would probably hate to give up fast, heated transportation. But these pictures make me long for a simpler time.